Cult 60s and 70s Film and TV Reviews and Features
Here is a list of the Retroscope’s top ten Helen dances from the 60s and 70s (in no particular order). Read more about Helen in our examination of her work, here.
Beautiful smooth lounge music from Laxmikant Pyarelal gently sung by Asha Bosle, in Aansoo Ban Gaye Phool.
Helen distracts a jailor in this melodic song from the film Shikari.
When you have had a bad day, nothing beats Helen- dressed as a strawberry, dancing energetically and telling you not to worry about life.
Helen Richardson was born in Burma to a Franco-Indian father and a Burmese mother in the late 1930s. She fled the Japanese invasion with her mother and siblings, ending up in India. Helen’s film career began as a chorus girl in the early 50s, before she got her big break in the solo ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ in Howrah Bridge (1957).
Known simply as Helen, she became one of the most well-known dancers in Indian Cinema- with an incredible dancing career spanning from the 50s to the 80s.
Read more about Helen – The Iconic dancer of Indian cinema …
As soon as that distinctive theme tune commences… you know you’re in for an hour of enjoyable escapist entertainment!
Towards the end of the 1960s, Roger Moore was hanging up his halo as Simon Templar, making a lightweight British cinema thriller Crossplot (1969) with his ‘The Saint’ (1962-1969) TV series producer Robert S. Baker – and he was being touted as the next James Bond. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Hollywood matinee idol Tony Curtis had been receiving critical acclaim for playing against type as the real life serial killer Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler (1968). Little did either actor probably know at this time that media mogul Lew Grade had plans that would bring them both together in The Persuaders! It would be, in the early seventies, one of the most expensive British TV series.
Read more about The Persuaders! (1971) – An Anglo American Alliance! …
Why do all the passengers from an airline go missing mid-flight? How does a food critic wind up in the middle of a desert after a night at the opera? Why has the ground floor of a stately home, found to contain a mentally handicapped young man and the dead body of a woman, been constructed inside an old warehouse? These are just some of the unsolved mysteries- ranging from the believable to the outright bizarre that British 1960s TV series Department S throws at you in its gripping opening title sequences.
An effortlessly stylish, twisty and entertaining gothic suspense. This kitsch avant-garde masterpiece from Japanese auteur Kinji Fukasaku, starring female impersonator Akihiro Miwa, has to be seen to be believed!
